


hard times come again no more

by wintercreek



Category: due South
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-14
Updated: 2011-03-14
Packaged: 2017-10-16 23:14:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintercreek/pseuds/wintercreek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Caroline Pinsent met Bob Fraser in Regina, where he was a cadet at the RCMP Depot and she was an undergraduate at the University of Regina.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hard times come again no more

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Luzula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luzula/gifts).



Caroline Pinsent met Bob Fraser in Regina, where he was a cadet at the RCMP Depot and she was an undergraduate at the University of Regina. Her mother always insisted that it was the uniform she fell for, which was clearly ridiculous. Caroline knew she'd have some trouble explaining why she was giving up a promising career in zoology to become a mountie's wife in the far north. She learned to trot out phrases like, "independent research in an understudied region," and "outreach to remote communities," and sometimes she fell back on, "it'll be an adventure, dammit! And anyway, I love him."

Their first winter up north, they had what Caroline thought of as an unfinished cabin. Later, when they were living in an igloo because their cabin was truly unfinished, she laughed about that. She tracked snowshoe hare down their runways to report winter survival rates and guessed at wolf populations, sitting up late into the night to make recordings of their howls. Acoustic biologists at her alma mater acknowledged her gratefully in their research, sometimes even offering her a third authorship. Caroline wondered sometimes what she could have accomplished in her own name, but she was too happy with her life to think seriously of changing anything.

Her parents never visited. Caroline didn't mind coming to them, not really, but she would have liked to show them the north just once. To her relief, having Bob's parents live close by was never a problem. They didn't meddle, and they respected her skills and research projects rather than chiding her about homemaking. Librarians, she concluded, made ideal in-laws.

The most traditional thing she did was have a baby, a darling little boy as smart and sweet as she could have asked. Caroline's mother asked when they'd move south to "raise Benton properly," and Caroline could only shake her head at the letter. It took her two days to write back, enumerating all the blessings of her life. She never needed to count the things she'd given up, with others so determined to count them for her. Instead, Caroline Pinsent Fraser learned to bear the rewards and beauties of her life before her like a shield, and she taught her son to do the same.


End file.
